MSN Search: spam like it’s 1999
Of course I’m just bitter because it seems to hate me in any sort of ego search (I generally come out below anyone who has linked to me, and below Bloglines preview pages, and below totally unrelated things for that matter, and he may not own John Doerr but Dave owns me), but I have to say that the results for digital magpie make the “new” MSN Search look like a spammer’s paradise. The number one result is number one thanks to a section of keywords stuffed into the bottom of the page, in black text with a black background. Bet the SESs are kicking themselves for having taken those out years ago.
Thanks. I’ll pass this along to the MSN Search folks.
The bug is filed. If you see anything else you think looks suspicious don’t hesitate to let us know.
If you’d like to give more direct feedback you can use the feedback form or MSN search wiki
PS: Do you really have to torture us with an XHTML validator to post comments to your site? :)
I don’t have to, since once I got within spitting distance of being able to safely serve everything as
application/xhtml+xmlI realized that I really didn’t want to, but… you get all my comments, from thewfw:commentRSS, right? Have you noticed that I don’t get a whole lot of comment spam, considering that I’m running MT and rank pretty high for the sort of search terms that comment spammers use to find targets?;)
Well, no one owns me, but I noticed that I’m for sale at overstocked.com for $7.97.
And we’ve finally found weapons of mass destruction. See http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=WMD&FORM=QBHP scroll to the bottom to see the evil truth - ebay has them.
Okay, WTF? Is it all the talk about Firefox, and thinking about buying a Mac, or the dissing of IE’s mime-type sniffing, or what? Now, having said that he pwnz me, Dave no longer does, now Adam does; and in reports from the field, Alp Uçkan pwnz me in Germany. The only thing I can see for sure that Dave, and Adam, and Alp, and the misplaced Magpie-spammer all have in common is that none of them have a Firefox ad on their sites. There’s probably something else, and at some point I’ll probably see something incorrectly on top that does have one. Probably.
The honest half of the question is, why? What factors are causing the rankings I’m seeing, what things is MSN looking for, or is it just accidental and early bugs? I don’t do SEO, but I do really like to know what turns a search engine on, and I’m just not able to make any sense of MSN yet.